So it turns out that it's been quite some time since the last time I did a history post on here, let alone an Iraq post, and for a guy with a history degree that spends a good chunk of his day following foreign affairs, that's probably a bit odd.
Let us turn our leporidic gaze to that issue, then, and use as the vehicle for the discussion a book by a man named Charles Duelfer, who you may know from the Duelfer Report on Iraqi WMD. Turns out he has a recent book on the subject by the name of Hide and Seek: The Search For Truth In Iraq. Just to get this out of the way, it's an amazing book, and if you have any interest in the subject at all, you should go get it and read it right now. It is, more or less, a comprehensive view of US relations with Iraq from 1990 onwards, viewed primarily through the lens of WMD proliferation - Duelfer was the second guy at UNSCOM in the 1990s, and went on to head the Iraq Study Group post-invasion. He's been involved with pretty much all that went on, and knows what he's talking about. It's well written and engaging to boot.
I have a few points I'd like to make in reaction. I don't think these will come as a surprise to anybody, since I appear to be the one person who's views on Iraq haven't substantially changed in the last decade, but I want to go on record anyway.
Firstly, I think Duelfer gives a pretty good account of what US official and popular opinion was during the 1990s and up until the invasion, and to sum that up briefly, it was that Iraq had a very long history with WMD dating back pretty much to the inception of Saddam's regime, and that Iraqi intransigence on the issue was evidence that he was hiding all manner of things.
Ultimately, of course, Iraq turned out to have more or less destroyed the offending materials, barring a few missiles (enough by itself to provoke), but as Duelfer points out, Saddam's intention always was to eventually reconstitute his WMD programs as soon as he could get the UN/US off his back. Not that we knew this at the time, but it's fairly logical in hindsight. It does raise a couple of very good points on Duelfer's part, namely:
1. US intelligence gathering in Iraq was pretty poor pre-war, and in any event the people tasked to it didn't really understand what they were getting into in most cases;
2. Both the US and Iraq had a very bad habit of thinking past each other - the US misjudging almost every move Saddam made, Saddam not understanding why the US wouldn't play diplomatic ball with him. The book is worth reading for this discussion alone.
Going along with the popular opinion thing, and this is all my point and not Duelfer's, a lot of people tend to forget this nowdays, but we spent a lot of time actively bombing Iraq and pressing for regime change in the 1990s, to generally popular acclaim from just about everybody. It was, furthermore, generally understood that Saddam was a really bad dude worthy of getting booted - this also being the age of Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Too, to some extent the US eventually wrote itself into a corner with respect to Iraq - we did sanctions (which were messing up Iraqis more than they were messing up Saddam and in any case were a huge hotbed of corruption), we did bombing, and eventually we started coming to a choice - either go in and deal with the WMD that were supposedly there and boot Saddam, or drop the whole regime change and non-proliferation things and walk. Neither one is a good choice, but the latter choice was potentially a whole lot worse, so we got what we got.
And to be clear, that's more or less why I thought invading Iraq was a good idea, albeit in a slightly less refined form in 2003. I guess I get to be wrong about the WMD thing, but given Saddam's general villainy and intent to procure WMD, I'm not really broken up about it.
That having been said, the other side of that coin is our actual conduct during the invasion and occupation. It's hard to fault the conduct of the invasion, but (and this has been hashed out a lot) the occupation is another story.
Duelfer's point is that not only did Garner and Bremer not do anything right, they also weren't particularly the best people for the job (and I think Bremer may even have made the same point in his own book), although I'm unsure who Duelfer thought could do better. Nobody that existed, perhaps. In particular, Duelfer was of the opinion that merely cutting the head off the Baathist bureaucracy was enough, that the remaining nominally Baathist Iraqis could handle things from there, and indeed that's what they thought would happen, and they were extremely miffed when that turned out to not be the case.
To be sure, the military doesn't come off particularly well either - not enough troops on the ground, not allocated to all sorts of things vitally critical to nation building and winning hearts and minds. You can blame the political leadership for that, and believe me we all do, but there's lots of blame to spread around, here.
Speaking as an armchair military historian here, this is something that baffled me at the time, continues to baffle me, and clearly baffled (and deeply saddened) Duelfer as well. I'd have thought these things were mostly obvious, namely that if you're going to pull of an invasion, it stands to figure that there will be an occupation. You can pretty much figure that you're not going to be universally loved, so that bit will be difficult, but you've also got a dictatorial state that's been wrecked over the past 15 years, and is going to need a lot of resources to get it back on its feet. Furthermore, it's going to take a lot of guys and money to do it right. It remains unclear to me why the senior military leadership of the time, most of whom came up through Vietnam and should be expected to understand this better than me, didn't do more. It's somewhat more clear why the political leadership didn't listen at all to them, but we've had that discussion many a time.
In any event, the book is Charles Duelfer's Hide and Seek: The Search For Truth In Iraq. Get it, read it. Eventually it will become a classic. Five of five aliens.
Posted by Dwip under Books, History and Politics, at May 4, 2009 12:11 AMI don't have a link handy, but Larry Elder regularly had as a guest on his show one of Saddam's former generals. I forget the guy's name now, but they usually touched on the subject of where the WMD's went. The general was apparently directly involved in operations to conceal those weapons. Larry always pressed him, and the guy always gave consistent answers leading to the conclusion that Saddam smuggled his stuff out to Syria just prior to the invasion, and indeed some operations were conducted DURING the invasion. He also pointed out on more than one occasion that he used a humanitarian aid mission as cover during some sort of incident involving a dam. It's been too long to remember the specifics.
This ties in with a report I remember hearing on ABC News about the Jordanians seizing a huge shipment of chemical and biological agents that were coming out of Iraq and destined for Syria. For reasons known only to Jordan, they sat on this for 2 years before telling us about it. The press reported it quietly and never spoke of it again.
Which leads up to the Israeli bombing of the Syrian nuclear base. Though our press refused to talk about what really happened there, it was all but confirmed that most of the material they were using was Saddam's junk from before the war.
So I'm not sure why people keep insisting Saddam destroyed it all. Surely he did destroy some of it, most likely as cover for where the good stuff went. But he didn't even do that much until he knew he was toast. He may well have thought we were bluffing about the whole invasion thing and was hoping things would blow over, but obviously with him dead now he was wrong :)
Posted by: Samson at May 6, 2009 6:07 PM